Flames
by YolToorShul
Summary: It's odd that your entire life can be altered by a single, dreadful event that happened so long ago, isn't it. But what doesn't kill you makes you stronger, she supposes.
1. Chapter 1

"Marry me," the drunken man slurred as he stared in an unfocused manner into the woman's eyes.

She rolled her eyes. "I don't even know you," she said, slightly annoyed as she took a final sip of her mead.

"But my love for you is like kindling fire."

"Fire," she scoffed, completely ignoring the rest of what he was saying, "the least reliable of the elements. It just does what it wants leaving no margin for control. Quite horrible really. Now I really must be going," she said exasperatedly as she quickly scurried out of the dingy old inn she was getting a drink at. She hugged her arms closer to her body as she walked outside, despite the downpour of rain falling onto her, the very rain she tried to avoid by staying a while longer at the inn. She'd always hated the rain.

She was on her way to the farm just down the road. The real reason she was at that dreadful, run-down inn was to steal an amulet off the intoxicated man from earlier and plant it in the nearby house, a job she received from her friend Vex in the guild. Unfortunately, however, the stupid man misunderstood her closeness and started coming onto her. "Idiot," she muttered, smirking ever so slightly. Why she kept doing these nearly mindless shill jobs, she would never quite know herself; she pondered this while masterfully picking the lock and entering the home, as silently as she could.

* * *

_The young Breton girl sighed as she attempted to create a fire with an overly forceful flick of her wrist. She never understood why she could never produce magicka. It was in her blood, her mom would say. It'll just happen one day, she says. "But what if it never does?" she muttered almost silently to herself before giving one last attempt. She sucked her breath in as one small ember appeared, only for water to begin pouring down on both it and her. Slowly at first, but it gradually quickened and started to come down heavier. "Mom, why can't we just go home?" she complained, hugging her knees to her chest and leaning against a rock, letting the rain pour down on her in an uncaring state._

_Her mother simply shook her head and closed her eyes. How do you explain that sort of thing to your ten year old child? How do you explain that you left High Rock just to follow the man you loved so deeply all the way to Skyrim just to find him bedding another woman? That you lost your job because you were framed for smuggling skooma to some Khajiit? That the reason you're living outside the walls of Whiterun is because you were caught stealing and had to run away from the guards? That you didn't even have a home anymore? "Synnna..." she whispered, pitying her own child for being in such a horrible situation._

_Synnna tore her stare away from her mom and looked towards anything else she could, not really expecting an answer. She looked at the cursed sky for putting out her flame and then back at the ground and at her feet. For reasons she could not figure out, her mom had been acting rather strange the last few weeks. Strange really wasn't the right word though. It felt like years ago that her mom came into her room back at the old house in High Rock and told her to pack her things. Though, in all honesty, that had probably only been a couple months ago. Synnna really couldn't remember. And there was that man. She hated that man with a passion. He was just so strange. He always ignored the child and touched her mom in such strange ways. Then, he just mysteriously left and she never saw him again. Synnna couldn't even remember hearing his name. That had been a few weeks ago, perhaps a month. She hugged her knees closer to her chest. Her clothes were soaked and she was freezing cold. Why did Skyrim have to be so cold anyways, she wondered angrily. Then, not three days ago her mother ran to their newly purchased house in a nervous frenzy, grabbed little Synnna, and stormed off, seemingly never looking back._

* * *

The woman left the amulet in the old farmer's lockbox and snuck out as quietly as she had entered. "Easy," she muttered as she walked back towards Riften, her home. She couldn't wait to get back, but it was going to be a long walk there, she considered while staring back up at the now pitch-black sky. She sighed regrettably as she strained her eyes to see ahead of herself, hand silently hovering over her blade, just in case.

* * *

_"It's getting late, you know," said her mother as she looked towards the darkening sky. "You should get to bed."_

_Synnna grumbled as she stood up and walked to their tent. Somehow, her mother had gotten it off of the nearby Khajiit caravan. She did not know how her mom had acquired it, but she did not care enough to actually ask. She crept into the uncomfortable bed roll and shut her eyes. _

_She was silently falling into what would have been a peaceful slumber when she heard it. The terrible thing that would undoubtedly change her entire life. She just didn't know it yet. Really, she hardly even processed it until it happened._

_"Well, well, well. What do you 'spose we have here, boys?"_

_Synnna cracked open an eye and looked desperately towards her still sleeping mother. As cautiously as she could manage, she shook her mother awake. She woke with a start, an unfortunately loud start that stole the bandits' attention away from the chest that barely had anything in it, save for a dagger and a bit of venison, and towards the two confused and groggy females in a tent._

* * *

"Hey, Brynjolf, have you seen Vex?" she asked, just wanting to put a close to this near idiotic quest she had been sent on.

"Aye, lass, just in the cistern."

And with a curt nod, she was off to the cistern.

* * *

_There were three of them, Synnna quickly determined, and they certainly weren't friendly. She glanced anxiously at her mother who was feeling around at her side. Synnna assumed she was fumbling around for her dagger, which was left in that chest, something her mom probably realized as well as her eyes grew wider and peeked at the three men walking closer to them. She quickly sat up and drew her daughter behind her arms. "Leave us!" she commanded, trying to sound as menacing as she could._

_The men merely chuckled as they drew closer._

_Her mother then stood in front of the tent, blocking it with her arms as she drew lightning into her hands in an attempt to intimidate the men to leave without any problems._

_"Well ain't that cute?" Synnna thought she heard the taller of the men say, but she couldn't be sure. She tried to peek her head around her mom's protective body to get a better look._

_"Little mage here has some lightning." More laughter._

_Her mother made to electrocute the intruders, but they were quicker. The tallest and largest quickly approached her and grabbed her wrists, drawing them over her head and he forced her against a tree. _

_The other two snickered. "Again, Wuulfric? This is the third one this week."_

_"Yeah, when do we get our turns?" the other said, seeming to be both joking and serious at the same time._

_"Later!" the first growled, causing the others to go examine the measly amount food and animal pelts the two runaways actually had._

_"What of the girl?" one of the other two asked, a smirk on his face._

_Synnna ultimately was still processing everything that had happened. Not ten minutes ago everything was normal- more normal than it had been now anyway. She jumped back and started to run at her mother's attacker in blind fury and courage._

_"No Synnna!" her mother cried. "Run away!"_

_The largest bandit, Wuulfric apparently, violently ripped his mouth away from her mother's neck and slapped her. "What are you waiting for? Grab the brat!" he barked at the other two men. _

_They glanced at each other and pursued the girl, almost immediately catching up to and tackling her. _

_"Make her watch and then kill her," he commanded them._

_So, following their grim orders, they drew her back against an adjacent rock, holding her hands steadily against it, greatly minimizing her chance of escape. She struggled as hard as she could; she kicked the man to her left as hard as she could and then the one to her right. They grunted in slight pain, but they did not relinquish their iron grips on the girl. Tears rolling out of her tightly clenched eyes, she screamed as she tried to escape their hold. Her eyes snapped open as she heard her mom cry out and scream as the man began tearing off her top._

_"MOMMA!" Synnna screamed at the top of her lungs, gasping for air from her tears. Something changed within her at that moment. And suddenly, her mom stopped screaming. She was no longer pinned to the rock. She no longer felt cold and afraid. She slowly opened her eyes again, and all she saw was fire, fire everywhere. It was the brightest and largest flame she had ever seen, and it was in every direction. She calmly stepped out of it, the flames seeming to avoid her as she moved. She searched for her mother, and even for those terrible men, but all she found were corpses. Burnt corpses. _

_"MOMMA!" she screamed again as she sank to her knees, tears resembling waterfalls falling from her face; what's worse, the flames only seemed to intensify with her growing anger. They wouldn't even stop when she started to calm down and tried with all her strength to stop them. Thankfully, however, she never got burned._

* * *

To this day, with the exception of not being burned by them herself, she never did learn to control her flames.

And on that night, Synnna swore to herself, to her mother, to the gods, that she would learn to control her magicka, but never again would she use her flames. Her flames, that were too large and dangerous; moreover, she could never learn to control something like that, could she? Sure, she would still use magicka from the branch of restoration, but that would be the extent of it.

Really, nearly everything that happened to her related back to that one night, that one horrible night in which little Synnna killed her mother in a pathetic attempt to save her. And that night would truly haunt her forever.

* * *

**A/N: Well... that turned out... differently than I first expected. In any case, please review. Tell me if you thought it was great or repulsively awful. **

**Anyway, I have a rather long storyline planned out for poor Synnna here, consisting mostly of current events but also several flashbacks, and this chapter was just sort of there to get the ball rolling. Was it too dark for the beginning of a story?**

**To be completely honest, I got the idea for this story at around 1 am and have been writing this for the past 2 hours nonstop and can't tell if it's any good or not. **

**Feeling like I'm probably going to regret this whole thing in the morning, **

**YolToorShul**


	2. Chapter 2

They say that youth is bliss, a time of true happiness and of ignorance to the horrors that surround them, that surround everyone, all the time. Youth is also a time for dreams, unrealistic but creative dreams. These children dream of doing heroic deeds and tasks in the future, but above all, they dream of the glory. They want to make those that are close to them proud. They dream of being someone that others would be proud to know or simply hear about.

But what if one doesn't have any family? What does the poor child that has no one dream of? What does that child do?

* * *

_Young Synnna grabbed her bedroll and her mother's dagger and roughly shoved them into her knapsack. With one uncertain glance back to the makeshift grave she had made for her in trying to at least be honorable about the entire ordeal, she headed off. To where, she hadn't the foggiest idea. All she knew was that she had to get away from here._

_So she walked on. She went for as long as she could before collapsing onto her newly laid-out bedroll with the dagger clutched firmly in her hand. Just in case, she told herself. And so began a cycle. She walked for as long as she could, and then she slept. When she nearly felt emaciated, she would take her inherited dagger and try to kill an elk with it, which sometimes worked well enough._

* * *

_To be fair, she took the situation at hand very well for a child her age, in her own way in any case. Sure, she cried for a while, hours perhaps. Once she stopped the tears and the growing flames, she dug. She dug a fairly small hole with nothing but her bare hands. She eased her mother's dead corpse into it, and covered it once again. Then, she uprooted the nearby flowers and laid them as gingerly and neatly as she could manage on the pseudo-gravesite. She left then almost without so much as a second though. She figured, why cry about something you can't fix? So, from then on, she kept the memory as much from her mind as she could muster._

_"Wow," she began under the cover of her breath, "it's amazing." She marveled at the breathtaking site before her. _

_"So this is the place from the whispers in Windhelm?" she thought. And so stood before her, none other than the College of Winterhold. _

* * *

_Over time, she had journeyed very far. She learned mediocre ways of thieving that helped her get by for about five years or so in the walls of Windhelm, where she heard of the College, which led her here. Here, she would finally learn to control her magicka properly, or at least, so she thought._

_Her thoughts, however, were abruptly ended by a rather drawling voice. "State your purpose for wishing to enter the college."_

_Synnna reluctantly tore her gaze away from the castle-looking college and to the bored-looking High Elf. "Um- I-I wish to learn how to properly-er-control my magic," she said, the uncertainty of her tone growing with every word._

_"Noble," the elf almost mockingly replied, in a way that said she would have said that regardless of what Synnna had answered with. Gazing back at her in her apparently usual unimpressed manner, she continued, "Well, now that we know what the College has for you, we will see what you have to offer for the college, shall we?"_

_Synnna's eyes grew wider in a state of nervous, yet excited anxiety. "A test," she wondered, "to just get into the college?"_

_"If you would please perform the following spell on the circular plate in front of you, I will judge if you are worthy of entering the College. If you do not know the spell, you may buy a book explaining it from me for only thirty septims."_

_Synnna was practically panicking by now. She hadn't used her magicka since that day, for starters. Secondly, she was reminded of the nearly unbearable fact that she did not even have the measly thirty septims to purchase the book for whatever dumb spell she was to perform anyway. Synnna's anxiety only grew once she noticed the impatient look on the other's face._

_"Well, are you going to perform the spell or not?" she interrogated a bit angrily. After seeing Synnna's confused stare, she rolled her eyes. "By the Eight!" she exclaimed not-so-quietly under her breath. "I said," she began, returning to her cold voice, "would you kindly perform the flames spell on the circu-"_

_"Could I possibly- I mean- is it possible that I may be able to perform a different spell?"_

_"In all my years," the elf muttered, not believing this would-be Mage couldn't even perform the flames spell, "never have I met a Mage incapable of producing fire."_

_Synnna's anger grew, but so did her nervousness. Deciding to go through with it, she lifted her hand and averted her glare to the target at her feet. Taking a step back, she tilted her wrist back, and she-_

_- couldn't do it. She glanced upwards, slightly mortified at the images running through her mind at what could have happened. She moved her hand down slowly, and without a second thought or a look back, she ran. She continued on the trek she had started so many years ago. And she ran south, all the way to Riften, the land of the thieves._

**A/N: Well... that's a bit of a letdown from last chapter, eh? In any case, be sure to leave a review to tell me whether or not you liked it. Also, if you see a way in which I could improve my story, please say so. **

**On another note, I'm sorry it took me over a month to update. I won't go on some spiel about how I was super busy (though I was). Really, what the problem is is that I don't actually have a definite storyline planned out. I have small ideas here and there and most of her past experiences as well, but I'm having a bit of difficulty deciding on a final plot line for the current Synnna and the Thieves Guild and whatnot. So anyway, please bear with me if it takes a while to update. It's not that I'm not thinking of the story, it's just that I don't want to add anything in now and come up with a great idea later that I wouldn't be able to work in because of whatever I update now.**

**Well, thanks for reading I suppose!**


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